Looking for Life by Looking for Life

The search for life beyond Earth has inspired many strategies, from examining microfossils with elemental analyzers, to sequencing putative genetic material, or studying the composition of distant exoplanets. But a recent paper from Jay Nadeau, a Scientific Researcher at the California Institute of Technology, proposes a surprisingly new approach of looking for life by, well, looking for it.

Nadeau and her colleagues suggest that “rapid and meaningful” cell movement is “an unambiguous bio